Wigan Flashes: waste land to precious jewel: Working with Nature

Congratulations to the communities of Wigan and Leigh on their new National Nature Reserve created by nature on colliery flashes! Flashes are shallow depressions that result from land subsidence caused by shallow underground coal mining. Once productive farmland, these hollows, considered to be wasteland, fill with rainwater, or intercept watercourses. The industrial exploitation of our British landscapes can too often create degraded and poisoned places, but sometimes these apparently devastated lands can recover. Working with nature, or even leaving nature to its own devices, we can ensure that the brown and grey of dereliction becomes paradise for our native wildlife and for surrounding human communities.

I remember observing how similar flashes in the Metropolitan Borough of St. Helens, just to the west of Wigan and Leigh, became popular bathing spots and provided a home to a rich diversity of native species. In Nord Pas de Calais, I have seen extensive colliery flashes that have formed around the abandoned fortifications and railways of the Maginot Line. There they were so numerous that there was space for multiple uses, but some were quiet lakes where nature could set to work unhindered.

Photograph (left) A Richards Moorehead & Laing restoration project to remove lead waste and create open space in Mid-Wales. The stream was once a straightened ditch but after 10 years it is lively stream in a natural bed surrounded by self-sown and planted native trees.

At the moment our efforts to counter Climate Change are fraught with political posturing. There is a frantic rush to be seen to be doing the most by planting thousands of hectares of carbon sequestering forestry plantations, formed from relatively carbon-intensive, nursery-grown trees, and all the forestry perquisites of tree shelters, fertiliser, pesticides and burnt fossil fuels. The carbon cost of all that is will take years to pay back. At our peril we ignore the truth that nature can do a better, cheaper and more effective job, with less energy and resources and with far greater biodiversity benefits than vast forestry plantations. Sometimes all we need to do is give nature a nudge with a small but well-considered investment...

Image above: A diagram originally prepared to demonstrate how species diversity increases with time and with appropriate management interventions.